Chapter 27
The sun rises on the first day of Hell Week with quiet warning.
Hendrix’s threats echo in Mallory’s skull, every rehearsal looming like a tightrope act. One wrong slip, and an endless fall awaits. She’s not sure who she is if she doesn’t have theater, what it would be like to exist in her skin without it. She suspects it might feel like torture. Like death.
Mallory attempts to study before the cue-to-cue, and her focus siphons away faster and faster with every tick of the clock.
She picks her cuticles raw while reviewing her notes for psychology, leaving behind red streaks on her graph paper.
She sits with Jessica at lunch and pushes her salad around on her plate, unwittingly fantasizing about blood instead of dressing.
Later, in the library, she stares out the window and wonders if she’ll ever feel human again.
She checks her messages constantly, texting Aunt Penelope as often as she can. CALL ME PLEASE.
But her phone remains silent.
She tries to quiet her anxiety by thinking of the night she spent with Saskia after leaving the theater.
The pearlescent glow of her hair in the moonlight, fanned across her pillow like a star.
The way Saskia coaxed Mallory onto her stomach against the mattress, fingers skillfully working her while trailing kisses up her spine.
How it felt to taste Saskia in the dark, encouraged by her nails in her hair, the soft stream of praise that turned incoherent as she came.
Mostly, though, she remembers what it was like to fall asleep together after, limbs tangled, unafraid of whatever nightmares might find them.
When Mallory arrives for the cue-to-cue, she drops her bag in the greenroom and immediately searches for Ezra. But he’s not in the lighting booth or the storage vault, not in the Crypt or lurking in the wings.
He’s nowhere at all.
Hendrix announces that Ezra called out sick with a migraine, promising he’d return for dress rehearsal. Mallory exchanges a worried glance with Saskia.
“I don’t like this,” she whispers. “Something’s wrong. Let’s go to his room.”
It takes several attempts to convince her, but Saskia finally agrees. Yet when they arrive at Thorne Hall, Ezra’s room is dark, and he doesn’t answer the exterior door.
“Maybe he’ll be back tomorrow,” Saskia suggests.
He isn’t.
That night, when Mallory tries to fall asleep in Saskia’s bed, all she can think about is how time is slipping and slipping from her grasp like a fistful of dirt. The curtain will rise at the end of Hell Week, and there won’t be any floodlights. Just bloodshed and grief.
A glooming peace. An ancient grudge.
Violent delights and violent ends.
On the third day of Hell Week, Arden returns to campus like a decorated soldier home from war. Everyone treats her like a glass doll, and a swarm of students hover around her at all times. Hungry to learn how she kissed death and lived to describe how it tasted.
Mallory’s heard enough to know that the story has changed shape, that in every version, the contusions on Arden’s head are bigger, the break in her leg more severe. Most people say that Arden fell from the ladder, that the faulty wood crumbled beneath her weight.
She’s waiting for someone to ask whether she was pushed instead.
Mallory tries to apologize all day. She waits outside the brick building where Arden has physics at two o’clock, stakes out her advisor’s office shortly before four. But she doesn’t appear either time.
By evening, whatever anxiety Mallory felt surrounding Arden’s avoidance is replaced with resignation.
Mallory sits in the dressing room alone and thinks about Arden’s bright laughter as they forged a pact that was meant to last a lifetime.
Their MW + AT, 1999 winks in the wooden counter. Her ribs ache with regret.
Mallory blots her lipstick. Dusts her face with setting powder. She starts for the door—
And nearly collides with Arden as she hobbles inside on her crutches.
For a moment, neither of them says anything. Mallory’s practiced apology skitters away like a fat black fly, and all she can do is work out the two syllables of her name.
But Arden only stares.
Mallory waits for her to say something. To yell or swear, spit at her for the fucked-up things she’s done. She would take her punishment, would welcome Arden’s ire, because anything would be preferable to her silence.
But there are no words left. The wound to their friendship isn’t going to heal on its own after all. It’s turned into an abscess, one that needs to be drained dry.
“Arden,” Mallory whispers again. Her name sounds like beginnings, it sounds like endings.
Arden turns her back and walks away without a word.
By the final night of Hell Week, Mallory’s fever has returned.
She stands in the wings with Saskia, costume cinching her rib cage, and tries not to scratch at the bite marks beneath her choker. Tries not to notice the way they’ve been burning hotter every day, as though her flesh is angry at being so far away from the thing that branded it.
“We have to find Ezra,” Mallory whispers. “Opening night is tomorrow; the gala is tomorrow. We’re so fucked.”
But Saskia doesn’t answer. Mallory tracks her gaze to the prop dagger lying on the table and sucks in a breath at the way her eyes suddenly look glassy and distant.
“Saskia,” Mallory hisses, grabbing her chin.
Saskia blinks rapidly. “What?”
“That’s it.” Mallory curls her fingers into little fists. “We’re done waiting.”
“What do you mean?” Saskia asks.
“The locks at Thorne Hall are old,” she says. “They’ll be easy to pick.”
Saskia raises an eyebrow. “You want to break into Ezra’s dorm? That’s a crime, Nancy Drew.”
“We don’t have a choice. We have to find out where he is.” Mallory gathers her skirt in her hands, ready to head onstage for her cue. “We’re out of time.”
Mallory finishes up in the dressing room, downing two pills before throwing on a sweatshirt she pulled from her hamper earlier, and dashes into the hall to meet Saskia.
But she barely gets ten steps before someone calls her name. She glances over her shoulder, noticing the light on in Professor Golden’s office.
“How are you feeling about opening night, Ms. Webb?” Golden asks when Mallory appears in the doorway.
Mallory leans against the wall, fighting a sudden wave of dizziness. “Fine,” she answers. “You know what they say: bad dress rehearsal, good opening.”
Golden smiles. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you, as my advisee, but I didn’t want to mention it in front of Ms. Garin the other night.”
Mallory tips her head. “Oh?”
She leans forward at her desk, hands clasped.
“I don’t want to make any assumptions about your personal life,” she says, “but I’d like you to know something.
There are power dynamics everywhere—in theater, in academia.
They’re inescapable. But when someone of authority abuses their power, it is never the fault of the person in the lower position.
Even if both people are students.” Her eyes narrow. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Mallory goes perfectly still. She nods, cheeks pink. Golden doesn’t have to mention Ezra for Mallory to know she’s talking about him.
“I’m not saying any of this to embarrass you, Mallory.” Golden fixes her with a pointed stare. “All I’m saying is that things are heavy enough for women in this business without having to carry shame caused by the actions of men. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Mallory meets her stare. She thinks of the humiliation that’s festered since that storm-soaked day in Ezra’s room when she realized she’d offered up her secrets, her heart, her body, to someone who was never going to protect them.
How her skin threatened to erupt in hives at the way his father looked at her, like she was something he’d like to devour, too.
“Yes,” she finally says. “I’m done doing that.”
Golden nods, collecting a stack of papers. They thwack the desk definitively as Mallory turns to go. “By the way. What’s that sweatshirt you’re wearing?”
Mallory looks down, and her face warms again. Black fabric. Red cursive letters. The Caligo Group.
She’d completely forgotten she took it from Ezra’s room, didn’t realize she’d grabbed it from her hamper earlier.
“Um.” She pushes a hand through her hair. “It’s a theater society in London.”
“Sounds prestigious. And an interesting name.” Golden ticks her tongue to her teeth. “Caligo. Latin for ‘darkness.’ ”
“Yeah.” Mallory swallows. “I’ve got to go. I’ll see you tomorrow, Professor.”
Mallory isn’t sure what makes her look back. But she does, finding Golden typing into her computer. Mouth skewed to the side. Fingernails rapping the desk.
As if turning over the name of an organization she’s never heard of, questioning whether it exists at all.
Thorne Hall looms in the starless sky like a fortress later that evening.
The night stretches into a blanket of navy, the air quiet and still. As if every tree is watching them slink to the stone patio outside Ezra’s room.
“Are you sure about this?” Saskia asks.
Mallory nods, rooting in her bag for the pocketknife. “Desperate times.”
She hands the knife to Saskia, who shakes her head and closes Mallory’s fingers around the handle.
“This one’s yours,” she says.
Mallory holds her stare for a moment, before pressing a soft kiss to her mouth. Saskia doesn’t want to be here, but she’s trusting her anyway. Letting Mallory take her hand and lead her somewhere in the dark.
Gathering her courage, Mallory kneels in front of the arched door and tugs a bobby pin from her hair.
She thinks back to Penelope’s house, how the bathroom lock would sometimes stick, and her aunt showed her how to force it open with a hairpin and screwdriver.
Mallory bends the bobby pin, inserting it into the keyhole before sliding the blade below, creating tension between the objects.
Trying to find the old door’s weak spot.
The bitter autumn midnight bites at her cheeks; in the distance, an owl screeches in the sable sky.
Her focus snags on something just overhead, perched right above Ezra’s door.
A stone raven. One she didn’t notice until now.
Of course, a raven statue would be tucked away here, at Thorne Hall. The building that was once a bridge between life and death.
Mallory wiggles the blade harder. And this time, the door clicks.
For a moment, they stand motionless in the blackened dorm, the only sound their nervous breathing.
Beneath the glooming shadows, Mallory can almost pretend it’s the first night she visited Ezra’s room.
Can nearly conjure the shape of him in the doorway, the way he fixed his green eyes on hers and invited her inside.
In the end, it’s Saskia who flips on the lamp, Saskia who screams first.
Because Mallory can only stare and stare and stare.